Erosion

It’s a Friday night and we’re all meeting together at this restaurant for dinner and I think celebrating Kay’s promotion at the Bank or something like that. I’m sitting right next up to Martha and she’s showing me some photographs of myself she’d taken last year with her cell phone at yet another restaurant but I’m not sure I understand why she’s showing me the pictures because I’m so tired from working late these last couple of weeks I’m not really following her train of thought and I’m zoning out at the end of each sentence of hers.
Then Bryce giggles then mentions something about turkeys but none of us are having turkey and I get a little too addled because there aren’t turkeys on the menu then I realize it’s some funny comment or something someone he knows has posted on Facebook which he’s browsing on his iPhone. Then Dennis orders more champagne before I even realize the first bottle’s already empty. Monika to my left says she’s been training and I just nod even though I have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about, and someone mentions someone else owing him seven bucks and I find it too odd a figure to be owed, and as I look at myself on the mirror behind Martha I notice my eyes are sunk deep and bloodshot.


There was this nightmare I had on the last day of 2010- I dreamed all my friends were gathered somewhere, I think at my place, and we were all talking and laughing and stuff but there was someone else there too, a presence, something dark, sinister, unwanted. When I lifted my eyes I zoomed in dead on to this somebody else, neither male nor female, with amber hair and amber eyes and pale skin.
That he-she smirked and pointed his-her bony finger at me and said I knew who he-she was, that he-she lived inside me and I would never be able to escape, and things were just bound to get worse from then on.
I recalled reading somewhere that if you looked at your own hands in a dream you’ll wake up but I couldn’t move, I was frozen with fright. He-she stood up from his-her chair and loomed closer. I clenched my teeth so tight I woke up from the pain in my jaw.


I’m looking at my own reflection on the mirror at the restaurant tonight and all of a sudden my mind goes blank. I blink and it takes a split-second too long to reopen my eyes. Then for no reason whatsoever I realize I’m bound here, to this, to myself, and that no matter what I do I’ll never get to walk on the moon in my lifetime, and for some reason it just makes me sad.

Move along!

So the office moved to this nearby town ok? Due to tax reasons and other stories I suppose but it's cool I can deal with it for a time. Coolest part was, who gets to coordinate the move from the regional offices? Yours truly. Have you ever moved part of a company to a different company altogether (we were bought out) in another location with another network, systems, etc? Awesome. We got to do EVERYTHING. You name it, we did it: Facilities, staff, network infrastructure, systems, testing, employee communication, asset control, hauling equipment, etc. A bit overwhelming, true that, but awesome!

We finished the last leg per se on a three-day run starting last Friday morning and ending this Sunday afternoon. Barely go any sleep: But how cool was hauling all that equipment across town past midnight last Friday under armed guard?

To be quite honest with you-- I thought we were not making it in time and I got this close to throwing the towel late last week when everything was falling apart and a new nightmare would pop up wherever you looked but then there was this huge funny argument about transferring some assets... fifteen cheap headsets and a microwave oven, actually... it was so absurd it was as if were being held back by petty crap and that bit gave me a second wind and man, Lyla, did we ace it or what...

Ready for going live tomorrow, now I gotta get some sleep.

Surprise party

So it was my birthday the other day see and the guys had all gotten together to throw me a surprise party but Dee sort of botched the surprise when he invited me over to this very, very fancy French restaurant we go to sometimes, and said I should meet him at his place before that. Thing is, Dennis never does advance warnings.

Still it was pretty amazing and they had decorated Dee's place with comic book figures and so on, but it was kind of odd when I saw the table all laid out like that, decorated, all that food and the drinks and the fancy cake they'd bought, and Cindy was so cute wearing a Wonder-Woman t-shirt and gave me a toy Batmobile, and Jimmy and his wife gave me a book of Bruce Springsteen pictures and Kay and Monika gave me a really cool dry-fit t-shirt for running----- and it made me fell so odd because I have such a hard time either accepting or understanding people can actually care about me. Must be some sort of defense mechanism. I don't know.


Still was was tons of fun and we stayed there up until two or three in the morning even though I had to work the next Saturday...

Emerald City blues

A dialog box pops up onscreen once I turn on my computer and it’s a message Heather must have sent me while I was offline. Call me when you read this it says alongside her new mobile number. We haven’t really spoken to each other for a few months now ever since this kind of nasty falling out we had last June, in which she left my apartment in the middle of the night in fact almost slamming the elevator door in my face for something I might have done or said.

But that’s the cool thing with Heather though, we always bounce back: We started going out some five years ago and ever since that first night she slept over we’ve been seeing each other in installments, for periods of one to two months, then not seeing each other for say an entire half-year, and starting it all over again. Most times I treat her like trash, but sometimes she treats me like trash too.
Maybe in the end we’re just using one another. Or maybe we really do like each other but we’re not entirely honest about it.

Of course by the time I see her message the first thing that crosses my mind is that I’m definitely starting the year getting some, which prompts me to call her up right away.

“I wanted to say goodbye,” she tells me from the other side of the line with a very cold, detached tone. “I’m moving to Seattle a couple of weeks from now.”
“You’re moving to where?!,” I ask her, wondering if I heard it right the first time. I mean, Heather probably couldn’t even spot Seattle on a map the last time I saw her.
“To Seattle,” she says slowly as if explaining to an old person. “That’s in Washington, in the Northwes…”
“I know where Seattle is,” I don’t let her finish her line.
“Cool,” she says flatly, then goes on to explain she’s enrolled at this course or another in Seattle and that she’s expected to live there for at least a couple of years, emphasizing all the proper words almost perversely.
“Cool,” I say flatly, not really meaning it, then bid her the proper farewells and good lucks, and invite her for a sendoff dinner and maybe a few drinks, who knows.
“Sure, that will be great, who knows,” she replies, but not really meaning it.

“An iPhone, a puppy, and a fruit basket”

When Dennis told me he’d invited Tess over for our traditional Sunday dinner I just gave him a half-smile in return and said she was a major babe. Not that she isn’t though, but to be completely honest with you I thought it was kind of asinine from his part, not to mention a little rude, given that Tess had ditched me a few months ago after one particularly terrific night out, no explanation provided save for a rather uncharacteristically blunt brush-off in which she claimed she was going to be unavailable for the ensuing four or five weekends from that day on.

It’s not that I was holding any kind of grudge against her. I wasn’t— the brush-off notwithstanding, Tess probably remains the sweetest person I know— It’s just that I was pretty sure it would inevitably get kind of awkward at the dinner table and in fact it did for a while, but once we finally got to the bottle of champagne any lingering awkwardness gave in to our discussing feasible replacement gifts for the Wise Men to present baby Jesus with.

Dee said the way he sees it, the birth took place at some boutique hotel and the parents were divorced, so if he were one of the Wise Men, he’d probably give an iPhone, which prompted me to suggest how about an iPod, an iPhone and an iPad?
Tess remarked it was probably better off as an Apple commercial instead and I agree, then we’d pretty much settled on an iPhone, a puppy, and a fruit basket.

Either way, that’s how we handled the awkward bit in it.

Still, that said, at some point during dinner Dennis asked Tess if she was seeing anyone. I think he might have done it on purpose just to piss me off. Dennis does that kind of thing sometimes.
She said no though, and went with the old familiar routine of how hard it is to find a decent guy these days, etc. I’m not judging her for saying that but it was kind of lousy. Of course our eyes never crossed when she said that. Maybe it wasn’t intentional. Or maybe it was. I’m not sure.

Still, in the end she gave me a ride home and it was pretty cool because we really hit it off when we’re alone, as if saying our lines on cue from a script. She even joked of our getting into another bet and stuff. Which is how we went out in the first place: We were at this nightclub once, when we came up with this wager of sorts to determine if the barman was gay or not: If she had the guts to walk over to him and sort of flirt with him, I’d take her to see Cats, front row and all that. And she did, and I did, but somehow we didn’t. I mean, not in the end.

And last night, when she pulled over to the curb we sort of looked at each other for a second too long and that’s where it got really awkward. I’m such a cretin at figuring out non-verbal communications, sometimes I think I might have Asperger’s or something.

And then as she left and her car disappeared up the street among this sea of bright lighting leftovers from Christmas it started to rain and the oil in the asphalt glistened like soiled, marred rainbows on the ground and each droplet from the rain distorted them further more, making them ripple irregularly, and made me think of all loose ends being yanked off their 2010 tombs and filing up to bite me in the ass in 2011.
—a leitmotif, urged as a gift to the newborn year ahead, if any, in lieu of the iPhone and the puppy and the fruit basket, so help me god.